Europa Europa

Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa (Hitlerjunge Salomon) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1992 and won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, though, in a piece of award-political controversy that became one of the more-discussed events of that year's German cinema, the German Film Academy declined to submit the film for the Foreign Language Film Oscar, partly on the grounds of its representation of German wartime experience. The film was eventually submitted by France.

The film is based on the actual memoirs of Solomon Perel, a German-Jewish teenager who, when the war broke out in 1939, was pushed east into the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland by his family. He was captured by the Wehrmacht and, in a remarkable sustained piece of survival under impersonation, passed as a pure-blooded Aryan, eventually being enrolled in a Hitler Youth boarding school. Marco Hofschneider plays Salomon; Julie Delpy plays his eventual love Leni; Hanns Zischler plays his Wehrmacht commanding officer.

The film operates in a register of dark-comic historical impossibility, Perel's actual life, written down in his own memoir, is so unlikely that critics initially questioned its authenticity. Holland's careful choice to balance the survival material with broad-comic moments became one of the film's distinctive features and one of the points of its critical debate. The actual Solomon Perel survived the war, eventually emigrated to Israel, and has been a continuing public figure across his post-war life.